For me, at least, the name defines the thing, and is maybe the most important part whenever I vote. Otherwise it would just be diagrams and stats with nothing to bring it all together, to give it a history and personality.
For me, at least, the name defines the thing, and is maybe the most important part whenever I vote. Otherwise it would just be diagrams and stats with nothing to bring it all together, to give it a history and personality.
The reality was I basically had a lot of the update written, went to check "what is the name of the ship so I can write this next part", and it was a tie. Then Alectai voted and I thought it was over, then did the tally and noticed it wasn't, and then just posted that the next vote which broke the tie would win. I suppose that could incentivise bandwagoning, but on the other hand just stating an end time could have done the same (and what if it was still tied?), and given how we were getting to the point of hour-long gaps between votes just checking back later and seeing if the vote was tied and saying 'vote closed' if it wasn't could also be construed to be favoritism for one or the other because it came after it had slowed down to a crawl.
We just need a line of birb names for the Skate class. There's only so many skates in the sea, after all. And we'll hopefully be building a ton of these things.
We just need a line of birb names for the Skate class. There's only so many skates in the sea, after all. And we'll hopefully be building a ton of these things.
The Selachii finishes final prototyping in the summer of 2159 after a crash-build that broke several records and with no end to the Earth-Romulan war in sight. The newly named UES Skate is a beauty of a ship on the outside, for all that she's a cramped nightmare inside. But she does what she is designed to do, and she does it very well. Her twin impulse engines move her small mass with frankly frightening accelerations, the sheer agility the ship demonstrates in tests proving it has no difficulty in outmanoeuvring the Stingray it is matched against and cracking open her aft plating with a pair of simulated photonics.
She soon had occasion to use the real thing. The Battle of Denobula had pushed the Romulans back, and forward operating bases set up by Andorian and Vulcan detachments threatened to penetrate Romulan territory itself. The war seemed to be entering a quiet phase as the Coalition conducted scouting missions and attempted to isolate Romulan industrial centers for strikes intended to eliminate their ability to build new ships.
That careful but methodical forward momentum ceased when the IGS Kumari came under attack from a new Romulan vessel in February of 2160. While only slightly larger than the existing warbirds with their squat bodies and winged nacelles, this "bird of prey" was clearly designed as a generational leap in capability from the T'liss warbirds that it replaced. Rather than stocking a pair of atomic launchers, it had a single plasma torpedo tube that used diverted warp plasma to fire balls of superheated gas at its target. Their new delivery system not only disrupted shields on impact but also dealt serious thermal damage to the underlying hull.
As if that weren't enough, a pair of forward mounted disruptors doubled the forward energy weapons and sported substantially higher particle densities. But the real problem was that they were capable of cruising at near Warp 5, a performance expected from Vulcan or Andorian ships rather than the existing Romulan fleet. This was thanks to reverse-engineering of wreckage and stolen Vulcan schematics for the main engine, while the nacelles were based off those from Earth starships. It was an unexpected reversal in the strategic picture that left Coalition leaders reeling.
Important strategic targets had just gone from over a year away at warp to a few months. There was serious concern that the willingness of the Romulans to engage scouting starships meant that a reserve of these new ships had already been assembled behind enemy lines and was ready for deployment. This fear was confirmed at the Second Battle of Sol in April of 2160, when the Thunderchild-class Warspite and a half-dozen Skate-class frigates were forced to launch without their torpedo payloads from the San Francisco fleetyards to assist a pair of Tellarite cruisers with engaging a trio of the new Romulan Birds of Prey, during which the under-construction NX Burya was torpedoed in dock and many of the orbital manufacturing facilities likewise destroyed. While one of the Romulan attackers was disabled and subsequently self-destructed, the other two disengaged at Warp 6 and fled the system. Nowhere was safe.
With the strategic momentum now transitioning to the Romulans and the potential for new ships with high warp factors that carried strategic weapons producing an atmosphere of fear in high command, a major thrust into Romulan space was accelerated from the planning and preparation stages. The Battle of the Galorndon Core saw Romulan dilithium mining operations destroyed, to which the Romulans responded by detonating antimatter bombs that sent the previously habitable planet deep into a volcanic winter and subsequent ice age. This simultaneously destroyed much of the dilithium deposits that made it so valuable and made turning its wealth against the Empire impossible.
The Battle of Cheron in November 2160 was a strike at the heart of the Empire's forward staging grounds for its Warp 3 fleet. More advanced elements of the Romulan fleet were drawn away by a dozen Vulcan and Andorian ships detaching from the fleet at the edge of the system on a direct course for Romulus, all of them at high warp. This left United Earth against three dozen Romulan warbirds.
In the United Earth battle line were three Thunderchild-class dreadnoughts: the Thunderchild, Polyphemus, and Warspite; the NX-class cruisers Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Endeavour, Atlantis, and Buran; twelve Stingray-class light cruisers, and nine Skate-class frigates. While lesser in numbers, the substantial firepower of the Thunderchild and NX-class starships went a long way to offsetting the lackluster performance of the Stingray, while the Skate-class on paper was on parity with the standard warbird in armament despite the disadvantage of its own fragility.
The battle began with the Romulans moving to engage the United Earth forces, correctly surmising that the intention of the Vulcan and Andorian detachment was to draw the defenders away and then use their superior Warp 7 engines to double back and join the attack. This potential window in which the powerful cruisers would be able to tip the scales in favor of Starfleet would have likely proven devastating and allowed a defeat in detail of the Romulan forces.
Instead the Battle of Cheron was a bloodbath. The first exchange of fire was to the advantage of United Earth, which had anchored its formation around the three equally-spaced Thunderchild dreadnoughts. These received the body blow of the first enemy contact, the Romulans launching a massive salvo of atomic torpedoes. This was blunted somewhat by the defensive fire of the NX-class starships, which used their phase cannons to eliminate nearly twenty of the incoming warheads. The Stingrays had likewise been instructed to set their first torpedoes to manual detonation, and when the fleet returned fire with their own salvo their warheads underwent fusion along the forward wave of the Romulan barrage and simultaneously destroyed the leading torpedoes by both thermal ablation and by disrupting guidance systems.
By contrast the photonic torpedoes fired by the dreadnoughts and the Skate-class frigates survived the nuclear conflagration unscathed, protected by their unstable graviton fields. While the Romulan opening attack disabled the Polyphemus and left the dreadnought dead in space, the rest of the fleet remained combat capable after the first exchange. By contrast the Romulans lost five warbirds to the photonics, while a number of other ships were left with shields fluctuating on the edge of coherence. These were rapidly penetrated by phase cannon fire, leaving three more warbirds dead in space.
Subsequent to the first moments of the engagement, however, the battle degenerated into dozens of duels between the Romulan warbirds and the more agile United Earth ships. The Battle of Cheron represented the highest losses of the war for Earth's 'heavyweight' starships thanks to United Earth's application of the linchpin doctrine, which dictated that the NX-class cruisers and the Thunderchild-class dreadnoughts should remain at low thrust to preserve their relative positioning to the rest of the fleet, refusing to allow the Romulans to harry them away from fire support. This hypothetically would allow them to use their capable all-axis weapons to assist nearby ships that were being singled out by Romulan wolfpack tactics, responding to keep the more vulnerable members of the fleet intact over a longer time.
This was certainly the case, as during the battle the Enterprise forced no less than four disengagements by Romulan forces from the aft quarter of Earth's smaller starships, and the other NX-class ships likewise disrupted the warbird commanders from engaging in their usual chase-and-fire tactics. There were losses to this tactic despite the best efforts of the larger vessels, though the Skate-class in particular proved itself able to juke and evade Romulans attempting to insert themselves behind its flightpath. In one case the Thornback not only evaded the effort of a Romulan warbird to do so but when the enemy disengaged to pick another target managed to come about and destroy the ship with a pair of photonic torpedoes fired directly into its dorsal hull.
The linchpin strategy did however expose the larger ships to more concentrated fire. The Buran was destroyed in the opening minutes of the battle, followed by Challenger and then Endeavour. The Thunderchild found herself missing a nacelle after a nuclear contact detonation against her starboard strut, and spent the remainder of the engagement at all stop and firing her cannons. The drifting Polyphemus was further damaged in the crossfire and then destroyed in the final stages of the battle as the melee turned against the Romulans and the warbirds began taking opportunistic shots against disabled ships.
Six minutes after the battle began, it ended with the Romulans executing a complete withdrawal from the system. In total, the Empire lost twenty two warbirds with just over a dozen successfully disengaging. Of these survivors, a further four were destroyed by the Vulcan and Andorian detachment on their way out of the system before the new Birds of Prey likewise managed to return and join up with the beleaguered retreat. The Romulan repair yards and supply depots over Cheron were subsequently destroyed in a number of smaller engagements with static defenses resulting in no losses for the Coalition.
But the victory had come at a cost. Thunderchild was scuttled after the battle, the enormous starship unable to form a stable warp field with only one of her nacelles left. Half of the participating NX-class cruisers had been destroyed, and the remainder were all nursing wounds of one type or another. Two thirds of the fleet's Stingray-class light cruisers were destroyed, while half of the new Skate-class frigates were likewise unsalvageable. Recovering from those losses would take years for United Earth, and the prospect of further attacks by Romulan birds of prey made the future of the war a murky proposition.
United Earth had mixed feelings about negotiations to end the war, but recognised the reality that Earth alone did not have the capability to prosecute a decisive end to the conflict without assistance. The Vulcans feared that nothing short of an occupation of Romulus' orbit would end the threat permanently, and were rightly sceptical of the feasibility of such a plan. The Andorians were of the opinion that it could be done, but that success might leave the Coalition so weakened by the effort that it would be rendered vulnerable to intervention by outside powers like the Klingon, Kzin, or Tholian Empires. The Tellarites were just as leery at the idea of pushing on, considering that the Coalition would make an eternal enemy by attempting an attack on Romulus itself where the bloody nose of Cheron might convince the Empire to back off entirely.
Negotiations with the Romulans by subspace concluded the month after Cheron and ended the war in a crushing defeat for the Empire. The Romulans not only agreed to formally cede influence over a number of systems they previously controlled, including Galorndon Core, but also provided information on their cloaking technology which made them detectable over long distances by tachyon-based sensor arrays. They also agreed to the creation of a ten light-year neutral zone that no signatories to the Treaty of Cheron would be permitted to enter, which implicitly ended Romulan control over several inhabited planets.
This generational humiliation resulted in the Empire withdrawing into itself and a chaotic political period that stymied any immediate attempts at recovery. Their surprise attack had united the Coalition rather than fractured it, the new cloaking technology was so temperamental that it was irrelevant to the larger strategic concerns of the Empire, and it had suffered real and substantial infrastructural and economic losses. The formation of the United Federation of Planets from the Coalition the year after in 2161 simultaneously justified their initial efforts to stop the interspecies alliance and highlighted their contribution to accelerating just that. The accession of Denobula as the first non-founding member of the Federation in 2164 was salt in the wound.
Earth would not hear from the Romulan Star Empire for the next hundred years.
Hoo boy, okay, that was scary. "Yeah, we now have warp 6 cruisers, the shit you've been fighting up until now were old reserves, we reverse engineered your shit faster than you did and then produced ships that can roflstomp yours in numbers high enough to matter, able to deep strike your capital worlds with virtually no reprisal"
At least the Skates did Work, and despite coming up against a massive tech and apparently industrial malus, we still functionally won the war, and got a more favorable peace out of it than the canon one I think.
Two! Apparently once they scrubbed the paint off the wreckage, it turned out the crew of the Endeavour destroyed before the war were in fact the crew of the Discovery pulling a prank. This is not at all related to a deep-seated antipathy towards the name "Discovery" in relation to Star Trek.
Peace is good, gives the new UFP time to coalesce and build up. Also we should have shields for our next ships which would have made a big difference overall. I am curious how well other designs in the place of the Skate would have impacted the battle. Because it looks like overall our war designs were successful enough but not enough to tell if we could have done better.
Yeah, it was good to have confirmation that the Skates could throw down with Romulan Warbirds and reliably claim victories, but those new Birds of Prey were nightmare fuel. But in the end, it was too little, too late.
Still, fucking hell, that was a terrifying reverse engineering into prototyping rate going on there. We made basically zero progress on countering their cloaks, while they managed to not only reverse engineer our superior Warp Drives--but do it better than us while retaining their advantages.
I think, all in all though, that this was still a better outcome than the canon Earth-Romulus war? I dunno, I'll have to check.
Yeah, it was good to have confirmation that the Skates could throw down with Romulan Warbirds and reliably claim victories, but those new Birds of Prey were nightmare fuel. But in the end, it was too little, too late.
Still, fucking hell, that was a terrifying reverse engineering into prototyping rate going on there. We made basically zero progress on countering their cloaks, while they managed to not only reverse engineer our superior Warp Drives--but do it better than us while retaining their advantages.
Yeah, it was good to have confirmation that the Skates could throw down with Romulan Warbirds and reliably claim victories, but those new Birds of Prey were nightmare fuel. But in the end, it was too little, too late.
Still, fucking hell, that was a terrifying reverse engineering into prototyping rate going on there. We made basically zero progress on countering their cloaks, while they managed to not only reverse engineer our superior Warp Drives--but do it better than us while retaining their advantages.
I think, all in all though, that this was still a better outcome than the canon Earth-Romulus war? I dunno, I'll have to check.
Yeah, it was good to have confirmation that the Skates could throw down with Romulan Warbirds and reliably claim victories, but those new Birds of Prey were nightmare fuel. But in the end, it was too little, too late.
Still, fucking hell, that was a terrifying reverse engineering into prototyping rate going on there. We made basically zero progress on countering their cloaks, while they managed to not only reverse engineer our superior Warp Drives--but do it better than us while retaining their advantages.
I think, all in all though, that this was still a better outcome than the canon Earth-Romulus war? I dunno, I'll have to check.
The linchpin strategy did however expose the larger ships to more concentrated fire. The Buran was destroyed in the opening minutes of the battle, followed by Challenger and then Endeavour. The Thunderchild found herself missing a nacelle after a nuclear contact detonation against her starboard strut, and spent the remainder of the engagement at all stop and firing her cannons. The drifting Polyphemus was further damaged in the crossfire and then destroyed in the final stages of the battle as the melee turned against the Romulans and the warbirds began taking opportunistic shots against disabled ships.
